Victorian Antiques
Fancy Fowl: How an Evil Sea Captain and a Beloved Queen Made the World Crave KFC
By Ben Marks — During Queen Victoria’s long and productive reign, from 1837 to 1901, countless buildings, books, and pieces of furniture were erected, written, and manufactured. Though the monarch did not invent Queen Anne Revival style, pen , or decree that otherwise comfortable sofas should be crowned with unyielding rims of carved hardwood, causing untold bumps on untold numbers of unsuspecting noggins, we routinely classify this varied output as Victorian Architecture, Victorian Literature, and...
Beautiful But Deadly: The Creepiest Devices From Medicine's Grisly, Leech-Filled Past
By Rebecca Rego Barry — The French physician Louis Auzoux was having trouble sourcing fresh cadavers. It was a common problem for doctors and medical students in the early 19th century, and if they couldn’t dissect the dead, how could they understand the inner workings of the human body? After touring a papier-mâché workshop, Auzoux began experimenting with the medium to create medical "manikins" or anatomical models—not to be confused with mannequins, the life-size human figures used to display clothes. Auzoux's...
Paint Pedaler: How a 1980s Michelangelo Found Fame on the Ceilings of Old Victorians
By Ben Marks — Larry Boyce was the late 20th-century's greatest champion of the stenciled frieze. An Oscar Wilde-like character in pith helmet and zebra-striped tights, Boyce logged more than 200,000 miles on his bicycle as he pedaled from job to job, painting Victorian-style friezes, crown moldings, and ceilings across the United States. At once colorful and companionable, stubborn and brooding, Boyce was an exceedingly complicated man, whose life started out rocky due to the circumstances of his birth in...
The Great Wallpaper Rebellion: Defending Flamboyance in a World of White Walls
By Ben Marks — Everybody hates wallpaper. From the red flocked-velvet damasks that once darkened the walls of Wild West bordellos to the garish supergraphics that give cheap motel rooms their trademark aura of tawdriness, wallpaper is an offense to good design. Almost worse, it is hopelessly out of date, a creaky cliché of decoration practiced by lazy interior designers, who only recommend paper wall coverings to the clueless rubes on their client lists. "From its inception, wallpaper was a copy, an...
That Old-Time Hucksterism: The Oddest Doohickeys of Industrial-Age Entrepreneurs
By Ben Marks — In present-day Silicon Valley, disruptive technology is the coin of the realm, no doubt because its business model is so simple: 1. Turn your competitors upside down. 2. Grab them by their ankles. 3. Shake vigorously until you are standing knee-deep in cash. Indeed, making money off other people’s ideas by identifying and developing an “unfair competitive advantage” has long been a sign of business acumen and ingenuity rather than mere charlatanry, even if the end products of such efforts...
Extreme Shipping: When Express Delivery to California Meant 100 Grueling Days at Sea
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — At the frenzied height of our current technological gold rush, the denizens of America's West Coast cities can have almost anything delivered within 24 hours—food, toilet paper, shoes, marijuana, and so on. But during California’s first boom, it typically took more than 100 days for goods or people to reach San Francisco from the East Coast. Getting there at all was a death-defying feat. "It sounds romantic, but I think it was a rather miserable existence for everyone.” These harrowing...
Dissecting the Dream of the 1890s: My Skype Date With Those Curious Neo-Victorians
By Lisa Hix — When Vox published Sarah A. Chrisman’s essay in September, “I love the Victorian era. So I decided to live in it,” it sparked an Internet furor. In the piece—a tease for her new book, , which came out in early November—Chrisman extols the virtues of switching over to clothing and technology from the 1880s and 1890s, as she and her husband, Gabriel, have. Sarah originally wrote the book, her third, in script with a fountain pen. "Yes, the Victorian era was terrible because of this and...
Healing Spas and Ugly Clubs: How Victorians Taught Us to Treat People With Disabilities
By Lisa Hix — In Netflix’s “Daredevil” series, a 2015 adaptation of a 1960s Marvel comic, flashbacks reveal that an accident blinding a boy also enhances his other four senses and gives him one more—radar location. That means the adult Matt Murdock can be a lawyer by day and a masked crime fighter by night, using his extra-sharp hearing, smelling, touch, and reflexes to brawl with villains he can’t see. In reality, a person with one impairment will have other talents and rely on different senses to...
Darling, Can You Spare a Dime? How Victorians Fell in Love With Pocket Change
By Lisa Hix — A young Victorian woman stands on a beach and stares out past the crashing waves, far out into the ocean, wondering where her sweetheart is now. His ship sailed months ago, and he’s not due to return for years. She has no way to hear his voice saying he loves her. The only comfort she has is the coin in her hand. She runs her fingertips over his initials engraved on one side and forget-me-nots on the other, and she feels soothed. “With love tokens, emotion can be felt in the palm of one’s...
When Housewives Were Seduced by Seaweed
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Among quaint fads of the 19th century, like riding bicycles or playing board games, one sticks out like a sore thumb—the Victorian-era obsession with seaweed. That's right: Affluent Victorians often spent hours painstakingly collecting, drying, and mounting these underwater plants into decorative scrapbooks. Why seaweed? "Part of the appeal was what a seaweed collection said about the collector." In Western Europe and the Americas, the 18th and 19th centuries were a time of major...
Untangling the Tale of the Seven Sutherland Sisters and Their 37 Feet of Hair
By Lisa Hix — These days, the biggest stars—like Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé—know the easiest way to get the world to gawk is to chop off your long locks for a “boy cut.” And then, perhaps, perform some sexually provocative dance moves on TV. "Their antics and wild, over-the-top parties were the talk of Niagara County." In the late 19th century, though, the most startling, erotic thing you could do as a stage performer is let down your Rapunzel-esque floor-length hair. In fact, according to their...
There Goes the Neighborhood: Mobile Victorian House Sets Sail for Desert
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Burning Man is flipping weird. The annual pilgrimage draws tens of thousands of attendees to the middle of an inhospitable desert where they enjoy a week of delusional mayhem, often in a haze of physical and spiritual intoxication (not to mention the dust clouds that frequently cover the sky). In this wild dimension where fantasy and reality collide, it’s not uncommon to see giant moving sculptures and “art-cars,” often spouting flames and exhibiting all kinds of mechanical wizardry. To...
Mummies and Monkey Skulls: 'Oddities' Host Ryan Matthew Cohn on Creepy Antiques
By Lisa Hix — Halloween is the time of year when people reveal their most ghoulish fears and fantasies, decorating their houses with fake mummies, plastic skulls and skeletons, and eerie contorted faces carved into apples and pumpkins. But for a certain breed of collector, like artist Ryan Matthew Cohn (pictured above, in a photo by Sergio Royzen), this sort of decor is just not creepy enough. Such collectors would rather deck their apartments with specimen jars, real mummified heads, musical instruments...
Could You Survive as a Victorian?
By Lisa Hix — Going Victorian is hot right now, with all those steampunks wearing pinstripes and top hats or corsets and petticoats while they build elaborate steam contraptions. But, seriously, do you think with your crude, unrefined modern ways you could survive in such a buttoned-up well-mannered society? The Musée McCord in Montreal throws down the challenge with its new online game that asks, “Are you a ‘civilized’ person, suited to the Victorian period?” (Thanks for the heads up,...
Hand Motifs in Jewelry
By Ada W. Darling — The human hand has been used for centuries as a decorative motif. We find it made of china, ivory, glass, precious metals, coral; in fact, from nearly every material that can be carved or molded. Collectors will find an amazing variety of uses and designs in articles featuring hands, and it is interesting to note that in some cases the positions of the fingers have a special significance. While the hand design was used many years before the Victorian era, it was during that time...
Selling Soap and Smokes With Victorian Trade Cards
By Maribeth Keane — How did I start collecting Victorian trade cards? In the late 60s I was a bottle collector, early American bottles and flasks. I started noticing there were colorful trade cards that advertised the medicines, often with preposterous claims about their curative powers. You could pick these cards up for 10 cents or so, so I started collecting them with the bottles. I just became more and more interested in the trade cards. I continued collecting bottles for another 15 years but eventually as...
John Werry Explains How To Appreciate Victorian Furniture
By Maribeth Keane — How did I get started collecting Victorian Furniture? Antiques are in my genes. My mother's family were longtime antiquers and lived in a house built in the 18th Century. But it really hit me about five years ago. We'd go furniture shopping and come out of the store not liking anything, empty handed. We didn't like the quality or the design of today's furniture, and we were getting tired of our cookie-cutter house. So we decided to go out into the country to find a historic property that had...
Malcolm Warrington Invites You to Learn about Victorian Greeting Cards
By Marty Weil — Malcolm Warrington is based 12 miles to the west of Central London. He is a council member of the UK Ephemera Society with responsibility for the society's web site. He also has his own site, The Scrap Album, which examines the history of Victorian Greeting Cards to illustrate how a small private collection can be used to inspire, inform, educate, and give pleasure to people of all kinds. : It's an honor to speak to you about your Victorian greeting cards, Malcolm. Tell me about how the...